Inspection and grading of food products, such as grapefruit, tomatoes, poultry, etc. are labor-intensive tasks. Typically, these labor-intensive tasks require visual inspection of the food products to determine whether or not the food products possess any desirable, undesirable, or unacceptable defects. Often, the process involves a subjective evaluation of the food products by quality-control personnel. The subjective evaluation results in a great variance within the range of the food products that are considered acceptable with in the industry.
Due to these variances resulting from the subjectivity of the evaluator, as well as the difficulty of conducting these operations at line rates for extended periods of time, the industry has sought to automate the implementation of the inspection and grading process. However, the task of grading non-uniform objects is nontrivial. Thus, despite the various mechanized processes available for automatically sorting food products, there is still a need in the industry for a better system and method for inspecting and grading food products.